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Integrated Digital Marketing – The Emarketeers iSkills Survey

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At Flock we love an integrated marketing fact or two… Here is our synopsis of a very handy piece of research by Emarketeers – the full version available here.

Emarketeers conducted their survey to measure the state of the Digital and Social Media landscape, and make some predictions for the rest of the year.

2014 is predicted to be another good year for the UK Advertising industry with digital marketing at the forefront of growth. However, the survey shows most marketers are not well prepared for this accelerated development.

For Flock one of the most arresting findings of the report is that the successful integration of all the different disciplines “old” and “new”, and on- and offline is seen as a key opportunity, and especially when it comes to social and content marketing.

Quotes from a Senior Manager in the Airline Industry on “How digital needs to change – the enlightened view”:

“Viewing digital in silos needs to be considered a thing of the past. On the digital wish list for 2014, integration or ‘joining the dots’ features very strongly”

And:

“Transforming digital to become an integrated part of the marketing mix across all parts of the business” will be the key to success in 2014.

When it comes to SEO and PPC there were also some clear opportunities. SEO and PPC were some of the skills that were most outsourced, giving agencies great opportunities. At Flock we believe that these are areas, and especially the data they throw off, should be held “close to home” as finding the right strategy, the right words to use across websites, adverts, content etc needs to be done by someone who truly understands the business.

Another desire expressed by respondents was to increase their creativity and innovation with regards to their Digital and Content strategies. This too needs another form of integration – creative integration – so what is stopping all this marketing integration from occurring?

The research showed that the major barriers to digital marketing integration were as follows…

Both ‘resource and time’, and ‘skills and knowledge’ are barriers to integration, that can easily be fixed if the right resources to fix these issues (ahem…that would be the sort of thing that Flock and people like Emarketeers get involved in). However ‘budget and cost’ differs slightly… Marketing integration brings bigger return on investment than “disintegration” so there are usually savings or increased value involved when integration is optimised.

The report outlines 6 Steps for success in 2014 for integrated digital marketing, which we believe have great value:

1)       Skills Shortage – Expedite knowledge transfer, grow and nurture talent

2)       Resource – Bolster up teams, boost training and rethink recruitment strategy to address the gaps

3)       Funding – Invest in understanding digital; accountability and transparency of ROI to unlock budgets

4)       Training – Prioritise training to close skills gap, create more formalised training programmes

5)       Integration – Build strong internal relationships for greater digital integration, and focus on blending the new and traditional disciplines

6)       Outsourcing – Look for agencies with the right mix of services to close gaps but develop relationships as a partnership too

Should you need a full plan to encompass all six points, or just a view on how best to join the dots, do not hesitate to drop us a line here.

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